The Last Party(Martin Green) The Last Party (Approx. 1,100 wds.)


The party was well underway when I arrived at Ruth Stanton’s house. It was a Saturday night and also Ruth’s 29th birthday. I pushed my way through the crowd and finally located the hostess, in the midst of a knot of friends, all talking and laughing loudly. “Happy birthday,” I said, kissing her on the cheek and giving her the present I’d brought, which was a kind of silly looking stuffed bunny. Ruth, I knew, was a great collector of stuffed animals and I hadn’t known what else to get her.

I’d met Ruth shortly after coming to San Francisco from New York City to work in an ad agency. I’d become friendly with one of my fellow workers, Ron Fairly, who was a graduate of UC Berkeley, and fell in with his group, also Berkeley grads. Ruth at the time was sharing her house with two other girls. The house was known for having a great view of the Bay and for the great parties given there.

My first impression of Ruth was that she was a typical California girl, large (taller than I was), blonde, tanned, supremely healthy. She’d inherited her house from her parents, who’d both died young in an auto accident and she worked in a travel agency. Ron and another friend, Gilbert Carter, began dating Ruth’s two roommates and when we’d go somewhere, which we did every weekend, someone else in our “gang,” sometimes it was me, would escort Ruth. She was nice to be with, knew all about San Francisco history, laughed easily and was undemanding. She was what was known as “one of the guys.”

Ruth’s birthday party was a great success. Everyone had a good time. Ruth received loads of presents. Late in the party three young guys came in, took out musical instruments and began singing folk songs. I thought they were pretty good and when I later found out they were the Kingston Trio, just starting out, I thought that even more so. A lot of people got drunk, which was standard for that time, the early 1960’s, and some passed out, but Ruth, although she drank quite a bit of champagne, remained ebullient.

In the next year, Ron Fairly and Gilbert Carter married Ruth’s roommates and as Ron and his wife started a family and Gil and his wife divorced the Berkeley group dissolved. I thought for a time that Ruth might also get married. There was a big guy at one of her parties she seemed very friendly with but apparently this didn’t work out and he eventually disappeared from the scene.

Over the years, Ruth continued to give parties at her house but fewer people came. Ruth was now drinking more and it wasn’t unusual that at the end of a party she’d be passed out. She was still working at the travel agency and arranged a nice trip for me to Mexico. When I returned I took her out to lunch downtown. She had three martinis and was pretty unsteady when I walked her back to her office.

At the next party of Ruth’s that I attended, when I was about to leave, she more or less pulled me into a corner and kissed me. I pulled away and said I really had to go. “So you’re a fag,” she snarled at me. I was surprised; I’d never heard her use such language. In truth, I preferred to keep my sex life private and was just then having an affair with my assistant, female, who happened to be married. “It’s all right,” I told Ruth, not really knowing why I said this, and I quickly left her house.

A few months later, my ad agency transferred me, a promotion, to Los Angeles and I didn’t return to San Francisco, another promotion, for another five years. Ron Fairly had long since moved to another agency but as was inevitable, San Francisco being essentially a small town, I ran into him downtown. After I’d admired the pictures of his three children, he told me that Ruth was in a bad way. She was drinking even more and recently she’d fallen, because she was drunk, he suspected, and broken a leg. He told me it would really be nice if I called her.

I put it off for a while, after our last encounter I wasn’t that eager to see Ruth, but finally did call her. I brought over Chinese take-out and flowers. On first seeing Ruth, I was shocked but tried not to show it. She had always been a big girl but now she looked immense. She sat in an armchair, her leg in its cast propped up on an ottoman, looking like a Buddha. An open bottle of whiskey and a half-filled glass was on a table beside the chair. The house, I noticed, seemed both empty and messy, with a strange musty odor. A few stuffed animals lay about, looking sad and neglected.

It was an awkward visit. At first, all Ruth could talk about was how her friends had deserted her. Then she turned on me, scoffing at the flowers and food I’d brought. Then she became personally insulting; I won’t go into the details. But when I started to get up and leave she broke into tears and asked me to stay. Finally, promising to call her, I broke away. Standing outside her door, I breathed in the cold night air with relief.

I knew of course that Ruth was in a bad way and thought of calling her again but things were really hectic at the agency and I was doing a lot of commuting between San Francisco and Los Angeles. About two months later, after I’d returned from a week in Los Angeles, I found a card from Ruth in my mail, an invitation to a party, for her 40th birthday, the Saturday before.

It wasn’t for a few weeks after talking to Ron and Gil and a few others, that I pieced together what must have happened and thought I could imagine Ruth sending out all of those invitations to all of those people, like myself, who used to come to her parties. I could imagine her the night of the party sitting in her large empty house, waiting and waiting, steadily drinking, until she finally realized no one was going to come. I could imagine her then going into the bathroom and taking the pills, the “accidental overdose,” which the obit in the Chronicle said had killed her.

The End

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